Category Archives: In Brief

As with my recent Tribeca roundups, I’m going to continue my attempt to catch up on festival coverage with a series of posts this week on Hot Docs, which wrapped up its 20th anniversary edition earlier this month. I previously wrote about AMERICAN COMMUNE, THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE, I WILL BE MURDERED, and RIVER in a festival dispatch for Indiewirehere, but am planning to share my thoughts on more then thirty more films. This post covers docs featured in the two competition sections, International Spectrum and Canadian Spectrum. The winners of the former included: Best International Feature Documentary to DRAGON GIRLS, Special Jury Prize to CLOUDY MOUNTAINS, HBO Documentary Films Emerging Artist Award to 12 O’CLOCK BOYS, and Best Mid-Length Documentary to THE CIRCLE. Continue reading →

This post wraps up my coverage of Tribeca with a look at eight docs from the festival’s Spotlight section, a programming strand meant to straddle indie and mainstream sensibilities. I should note that Spotlight included two additional docs that I didn’t get a chance to watch – GASLAND PART II and IN GOD WE TRUST – and a couple whose subject matter just didn’t pique my interest enough to watch – MCCONKEY and THE MOTIVATION. Continue reading →

Continuing my belated roundup of last month’s Tribeca Film Festival, this post covers the fest’s high profile Gala slots and the catch-all Special Screenings, which includes several of the ESPN Sports Film Festival sidebar. One additional post will follow later this week covering the Spotlight section. Continue reading →

The twelfth edition of NYC’s Tribeca Film Festival came to a close just over two weeks ago, but my back-to-back travel schedule has delayed my roundup until now – as it is, I’m writing this from my Reykjavik hotel room with spotty Internet. While readers have likely already noted Tribeca’s awards, for the sake of comprehensiveness, the doc winners included: Best Documentary to THE KILL TEAM, with a Special Mention to OXYANA, which also received the jury award for Best New Documentary Director; Best Editing to LET THE FIRE BURN (pictured); Tribeca (Online) Best Feature to LIL BUB & FRIENDZ; and Documentary Audience Award to BRIDEGROOM. I managed to miss the two bookending award winners, but cover OXYANA and LET THE FIRE BURN below, which covers docs from the Competition and Viewpoints categories, with LIL BUB in a follow up post that includes the Gala, Spotlight, and Special Screenings sections. Continue reading →

Nonfiction insiders got a sneak peek at a number of upcoming projects during the Hot Docs Forum, running alongside the public festival. My article on the pitches that made a roomful of international commissioning editors take notice is up at Indiewirehere.

Due to back-to-back travel, I’m woefully behind in my festival roundups – Tribeca is still in the queue and Hot Docs has now joined the to-do list. I plan to catch up over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, I contributed to a brief roundup of ten notable Hot Docs selections for Indiewire last week here.

This post wraps up my coverage of this year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival – previous postings may be found here (a pointer to my Indiewire coverage of several Greek titles and works-in-progress) and here (highlights from three fest sections). Below are thoughts on a number of the remaining sections, “Recordings of Memory,” “Habitat,” and “Human Rights.” Continue reading →